Another good reason for using field switches is that their use makes the formatting in the Word document independent of the formatting in the Excel workbook. For example, you might have numbers without thousands separators in Excel, but want them to show in the Word document; or you might want to differentiate between +ve and -ve values by colour - something you can't do via any kind of formatting at the Excel end. With dates, you might want to have day-of-week, date & month only, whereas Excel hold date, month & year, or you might want the date to appear in one format at one location and in another format somewhere else. All of this can be achieve via field switches in Word, with no changes to the datasource.

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Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]